Prajakt Raut - Co-founder Angel Investors Consortium

Prajakt has over 25 years of experience as an entrepreneur, marketing professional and entrepreneurship evangelist. Prajakt helps startups understand the dynamics of business, and assists them in developing meaningful business plans. He mentors startups on strategy, business model & monetization, fundraising and on preparing the company for growth.

Prajakt was previously a part of the founding team of The Hatch for Startups, where he established the brand as a leading player in the early-stage entrepreneurial eco-system in India. Prajakt was the face of The Hatch, and as its executive director, created the out reach programs, deal flow management processes, productized the offering for portfolio companies and built meaningful partnerships with relevant stakeholders.

Between 2004 – 2007, Prajakt had taken a 3-year sabbatical to be the Asia Director for TiE (The Indus Entrepreneurs), a global non-profit organization focused on promoting entrepreneurship. At TiE, he was primarily focused on helping entrepreneurs in India connect with the emerging early-stage investor community. In that role, Prajakt helped create interconnectivity between overseas investors and Indian entrepreneurs.

Prajakt has spent over a decade in advertising and marketing companies including Grey, Madison DMB&B and Capital. He was also part of the founding team of a printing business and a CRM solutions company.

Prajakt's personal goal in life is to encourage and assist a 100,000 people to become entrepreneurs and for this he also volunteers time with organizations like the National Entrepreneurship Network [NEN] and TiE.

Hi Prajakt , Thanks for extending your helping hands to the entrepreneurs of this community. I have just started a company along with 2 more people. We are working on a platform for help Artists in the entertainment field to promote themselves online. I would love to get your feedback as well as your help in creating a business plan. Can I please share the presentation on your email id listed in one of the comments?

just found you so determined to help the budding entrepreneurs. sir i have started with faith & hope clothing that is selling online and to showrooms. www.fndh.in. there are hell lot of queries about so many things , it will be great if can ever can hear you that how to grow or any day to day issues arising in business. do check the site sir

E-commerce venture, like many already existing, find it very difficult to make a good business case. The cost of customer acquisition is high, and unless you have enough stickiness to convert the lifetime value into revenues, it is difficult to make money in e-commerce ventures.

Also, given that there are many established players, new ventures will need a lot of capital to build a brand. It is unlikely to be done with angel capital or bootstrapping. You may survive, but scaling up is challenging.

for such a close review . i agree with your all the facts completely and those were the main things which came first to my mind before going for venture, that's why i shifted my whole stress from making it a successful online brand to making it a successful retail shopping brand . i want to use online space for marking companies presence . we are just targeting on 10-15% of online sales from my total business.

first stage of funding has been put into business by family and luckily second stage will be done by the same, but with family businesses and it's own requirement third stage will be difficult , but hope to manage genuine profits which could result to bootstrapping.

in present it's hard to guess business conditions so can't state further. do tell me your views on plan b sir.